MS Word treats each letter input as … (see attached image):
Can this be improved?
This topic is based on the comment I made here:
I agree with you; it is counter intuitive to type the diacritic before the base letter. That is just like dotting the “i” before writing the body of the “i”.
I have also noticed a similar problem relating to spell-checking in Keyman: When I type in the local language, each keystroke is taken to mean a word, so that if you decide to undo typing a word, you can’t; you can only undo typing a letter. It makes the undo/redo function in MS Word to be less useful.
and Marc’s reply here:
There are a number of things going on here.
With Keyman, you can setup the typing order to be whichever works better for your users. If your users prefer to type diacritics afterwards, they can do so, and you can use a post-processing group as @Lorna suggested to normalize any combining marks into a composed form. It’s a little more complex than an NFD keyboard, but it’s worth the effort. We can help you with this if you need. (Note, you also need to make sure your rule contexts cater to both …
Spec:
Marc
March 3, 2025, 5:15am
2
Yes, I agree it’s not ideal but I don’t know of any way to improve this with Word at present.
